


Five-Year Plan

by TeekiJane



Series: 1000 Words [6]
Category: Baby-Sitters Club - Ann M. Martin
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:41:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25957675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeekiJane/pseuds/TeekiJane
Summary: Sometimes, dreams die hard.
Series: 1000 Words [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/820050
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Five-Year Plan

Mary Anne reflects on how things rarely turn out the way you expect. When she was in high school, her guidance counselor drilled into her that she needed a five-year plan, and that she needed to stick to it. Every job and every person in her life needed to fit into her plan, and she needed to pick a college that would help her get there.

Everyone seems to have the five-year plan for Mary Anne. She’s going to graduate high school, get a college degree, and then barely use it. She’ll find a man, fall in love and settle down. She’s destined to be a stay at home mom to a couple of nice kids, fill in as a Brownie leader or Cub scout master as needed, and be gloriously happy knowing that she’s helping shape the next generation. 

Mary Anne is single when she graduates college. She gets a degree in special education and then decides she, as a twenty-one-year-old, doesn’t have enough life experience to jump straight into a teaching career. After a stint in AmeriCorps, she finds a job in an underfunded inner-city school and moves into a rented room in Brooklyn. She throws herself into a world of Individual Education Plans and expecting the unexpected out of her students. 

Mary Anne thinks she finds her prince charming in a coffee shop a few blocks from the school that is her life. He’s a Manhattan corporate attorney and his life is vastly different from her own. She’s taken in by his slick words and fast-paced lifestyle, and before she has a chance to get past the infatuation stage, they’ve already married. It’s that old five-year plan falling into place, just five years later than expected, and she’s desperate in some ways to skip straight to the happily ever after part with a child or two. 

But it’s not meant to be. When the high of the whirlwind wears off, she realizes he has problems. When she follows a trail of missing money just six months after their wedding, she assumes the rented apartment she’s never heard about is where he keeps a mistress. Instead, she winds up begging her new husband to go to rehab. 

He chooses the drugs over her. Mary Anne is devastated, but she realizes that it was better to find out now, rather than traumatizing a house full of kids. She takes the healthy settlement that her ex’s lawyer offers. It’s dirty money, but she cleans it by making a completely fresh start. When the school year ends, Mary Anne quits her job and moves to Maine, taking up residence in the most storybook cottage she can find. She takes a year off work to get to know her new neighborhood and her new self. 

She thought New York was in her soul – the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Maine’s salty ocean air and the down-to-earth people remind her of Stoneybrook, but life moves even slower here than where she grew up, and that’s what her heart craves now. Mary Anne knits and sews and, while she thinks about opening her own sewing shop like the one where she worked in high school, she finally feels the pull back to the schools. She applies for a job as a special education coordinator. It’s different from what she has done before, as she has always had a classroom of her own, instead of helping general education teachers help their students. But she loves it all the same. 

Maine changes her five-year plan, which stretches into a ten-year plan. Instead of a husband and children, it’s more education for herself and, eventually, an eye towards a vice principal or even principal position. It’s when she enrolls in her first class towards this end that she meets Carl. He’s everything her ex was not, soft-spoken and understated. She quickly learns he is a widower with a child. Carl’s daughter is older than Mary Anne was when her father started dating, and by the time the two share their first kiss, she’s already graduated high school. She’s a lovely young woman, but Mary Anne can tell that she doesn’t see her as a mother figure, or even particularly need one. That role has already been filled. 

Carl is open to starting a family of their own. He wants Mary Anne to have everything she’s ever dreamed of. She’s thirty-five and Carl is nearing fifty when they marry, and he has just started a new position as vice principal in a school fifty miles away. Mary Anne sells her beloved cottage and they find an affordable home halfway between their two jobs. He tells her that he’s open to however she sees their future. If she wants to stay home and raise their children, he can make that work. Mary Anne loves her work and can’t picture stopping completely, so they discuss planning for a spring baby, letting her stay home for her maternity leave and the entire summer break before she returns to work. 

It takes over a year for her to conceive, throwing a wrench into her plans. She’ll miss the beginning of the school year, but she almost doesn’t care. For eight short weeks, she sees everything coming together. She starts decorating a nursery in her head and buys cute little outfits. She and Carl begin discussing names for their future child – Richard for a middle name, girl or boy. 

She’s a ball of nerves when she goes in for that first doctor’s appointment. She lies on the table, waiting for a first image of her baby, but when it pops up, it’s still as can be. The doctor tells her later that the baby has stopped growing, and its heart stopped beating over a week ago. 

She and Carl both mourn in their own way. Mary Anne’s doctor assures her she has a good chance of carrying to term next time, but that’s not meant to be either. Mary Anne names each baby in her head, giving them a gender and an identity, a guess who they would have been. But after the fourth time it happens, she stops. It hurts too much. 

She’s nearly forty now, and soon they will have been trying for five years. The nursery, painted and swept clean several years ago, has turned dusty again. About a year ago, she took to storing things in it. The boxes of little outfits she bought and a christening dress she had started smocking are stacked up neatly in the corner. She didn’t even touch them when she got the last positive test. 

The doctors don’t know why. Mary Anne’s been angry with them. With herself. With God. She sees people having unplanned babies left and right, and she dies a little inside each time. But she keeps trying anyway. 

Sometimes, dreams die hard.

**Author's Note:**

> Fills the 'Wish' square on BSC100 table one.
> 
> This story isn't quite finished, but I felt a strong need to get it out there. I may come back in and edit it; much like Mary Anne (and my own) life, it feels incomplete.


End file.
